With modern treatments, would football coach Vince Lombardi have tackled his cancer?
In our mind’s eye, we see Vince Lombardi in black-and-white. It’s the image from the flickering TV screens of the time—the ’60s—and the stirring, heroicizing documentary footage that even now still makes it onto football pregame and halftime shows, 35 years after his death: any given Sunday, the sidelines of a frozen football field, Lombardi pacing, looking like an insurance salesman in a black hat and trench coat, his hands clenched behind his back, his eyes burning behind thick glasses as he exhorts his Green Bay Packers to another NFL championship or Super Bowl trophy, roaring at the officials, steam emitting in bursts from the wide gap between his two front teeth. Black-and-white, too, is the way we think of his victory-at-all-costs philosophy. “Winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing,” was a maxim by which he lived. It wasn’t “a sometime thing” but “an all the time thing.” Men had to be strong (at just 5 feet 8 inches, he was tough enough to be part of Fordham University’s le
